Live half-hourly Octopus Agile prices for every UK region. Tell us the appliance, we'll tell you the cheapest time to run it.
Electricity prices on the wholesale market change every half hour, mostly driven by how much wind is blowing and how much gas-fired power the grid needs to fill the gap. On most tariffs you never see this — you pay one flat rate all day.
On Octopus Agile you pay the actual half-hourly price, published the day before at around 4pm. When the wind is blowing hard at 3am, prices can drop below 5p/kWh. At 5pm on a still winter evening they spike past 30p.
Yes, prices really do go negative — and Octopus actually pays you. Octopus calls it Plunge Pricing. It happens roughly 5–10 times a month, usually overnight when wind generation is high and demand is low. The credit shows up on your statement as a line called "Total Rebate" and offsets the rest of your usage that period. Charge your EV, run the dishwasher or fire up the tumble dryer in a plunge slot and your bill genuinely goes down. Look out for the purple banner at the top of the page when one's coming up.
Use the Appliance Scheduler below to find the cheapest 30 min – 6 hour window in the next day or two to run your dishwasher, EV charger or heat pump.
Pick an appliance — we'll show you the cheapest time to run it in the next day or two.
Pick an appliance above and we'll find the cheapest time to run it.
On Octopus Agile, electricity is usually cheapest between roughly 11pm and 6am, when demand is low and wind generation is high. Specific cheapest half-hours change every day and are published at around 4pm for the following day. Use the live tracker above to see today and tomorrow's actual rates for your region.
Peak rates on Agile typically fall between 4pm and 7pm, when households cook dinner, switch lights on and turn up heating. Winter peaks are sharper than summer ones and can spike past 30p per kWh. The chart above shows the exact peak window today and tomorrow for your region.
Yes, on time-of-use tariffs like Octopus Agile, Octopus Go and Economy 7. Standard variable tariffs charge the same flat rate at every hour, so it doesn't matter when you use power. Only smart-meter customers on a half-hourly tariff actually pay less for night-time usage. Read more in our guide to the cheapest time of day for electricity.
Octopus Agile is a smart electricity tariff where the unit price changes every 30 minutes, tracking the wholesale market plus a fixed margin and the Ofgem cap formula. Customers shift flexible loads (EV charging, dishwasher, heat pump) into the cheap windows and pay much less than the standard cap rate. See our full Octopus Energy review for how Agile compares to their other tariffs.
Yes. Octopus calls it Plunge Pricing. When the wholesale price dips below 0p (usually overnight when wind generation is high) the negative rate is passed through to your account, appearing on your statement as a "Total Rebate" line that offsets the rest of your usage. Plunge events happen roughly 5 to 10 times per month.
Customers who can shift around half their usage to cheap windows typically save 20-40% versus the Ofgem flat-rate cap (24.5p per kWh in Q2 2026). Non-shifters who run everything at peak can pay more than the cap. Agile rewards flexibility, especially EV owners, heat pump households and anyone with a battery.
The UK grid is split into 14 Distribution Network Operator (DNO) regions. Each region has different network costs, losses and local supply-demand dynamics, so the half-hourly Agile rate differs slightly by region even though the wholesale market is national. Use the postcode lookup above to see your exact region.
Yes for any half-hourly tariff like Octopus Agile, Go or Intelligent Go. Standard meters can only record total usage, not which half-hours you used it in. A SMETS2 smart meter takes a reading every 30 minutes and is free to install through your supplier.